Editorial: Bacterial population heterogeneity, stress response and antibiotic tolerance

The emergence of antibiotic resistance is a critical challenge for infectious disease control and global health, resulting in treatment failure and increased mortality (Abbas et. al., 2024).Multiple independent and synergistic mechanisms enable bacteria to survive antibiotic treatment, relapse, and evolve resistance (Sulaiman and Lam 2022, Datta et. al., 2024). Intrinsic factors-such as population heterogeneity that generates persistent or tolerant subpopulations, and stress responses that promote genetic variation-play a central role in the development and stepwise progression of antibiotic tolerance towards resistance (Brauner et al., 2016;Levin-Reisman et al., 2017;Balaban et al., 2019). While traditional diagnostic and therapeutic approaches focus on resistance detection (WHO, 2025), there is growing emphasis on understanding molecular mechanisms underlying bacterial stress response and tolerance (Nandakumar et. al., 2014;Vijay et. al., 2024), and employing novel antibiotic combinations and potentiators to improve outcomes (Ilchenko et. al., 2024).In the research topic, a comprehensive review by Alikhani et al.